Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday addressed the TERI’s World Sustainable Development Summit. PM stressed on the point that environmental sustainability can only be achieved through climate justice. He told profitable climate actions to require sufficient financing and developed nations need to attain their responsibilities on finance and technology transfer to the lesser developed countries.
He noted that the energy needs of the people of India are predicted to nearly double in the next twenty years and withholding this energy would be “denying life to millions”. He believed that although there has been a lot of conversation on climate change since the 1972 Stockholm Conference, “very little progress” has been earned so far. However, India has stepped the talk in terms of policies to curb climate change and talk on environmental concerns.
He focused on the point that sustainability needs coordinated effort for the global commons. “We must work towards assuring availability of clean energy from a worldwide grid everywhere at all times. This is the ‘whole of the world’ direction that India’s values stand for”, he further asserted.
Summarizing the government’s efforts towards environmental protection along with energy access for the poor, the Prime Minister told: “Equitable energy access to the poor has been a cornerstone of our environmental policy”, he told.
He asserted that 90 million households have earned access to clean cooking fuel under Ujjwala Yojana and renewable energy has been accessible to farmers under the PM-KUSUM scheme. Under PM-KUSUM, farmers are encouraged to prep solar panels, use them and vend surplus power to the grid to facilitate sustainability and equity.
The LED bulb distribution strategy that has been running for the last seven years has enabled saving more than 220 billion units of electricity and 180 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year, Modi explained further saying that the national hydrogen mission intends to tap into green hydrogen.
He encouraged academic and research universities like TERI to come up with scalable remedies to infer the capacity of green hydrogen. “We firmly believe in fulfilling all our commitments made under the U.N.F and Triple C. We have also raised our ambitions during CoP-26 at Glasgow,” Modi told. He also put forward questions over the vulnerability of island nations and asserted that these ‘island developing states’ need critical protection.
